However, this suggestion may seem to imply that we must think through what is said in each case with an eye toward the modification and, above all, toward the awakening of being’s relation to us. Being, however, is not ‘something’ that lies hidden in some supersensory place and in the heights of some vast soaring speculation. As the little word ‘is’ makes clear to us each time it appears, being ‘is’ the nearest of the near. [104] Yet, because the human being troubles himself first and foremost only with what comes next, he constantly avoids the nearest, particularly since he appears to know very little about the near and its essence.
The series of steps in which we elucidated the translation of τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε finally yielded the equating of the expression “the never submerging” with “the perpetually emerging,” or, in Greek, τὸ ἀεὶ φύον. Instead of this phrase, which is not found within Heraclitus’s writings, we could say τὸ ἀείζωον, “the perpetually living,” a word used by Heraclitus in fragment 30. Again we stand before a foundational word: ζωή, ζῆν (‘living’). This word of Heraclitus’s indicates the essential nearness of ‘living’ and ‘being’ already at the inception of the history of Occidental thinking, and throughout the course of that history taken as a single moment.
In the final stage of this history, Nietzsche has articulated the equivalence of ‘being’ and ‘living,’ and indeed in the sense that ‘living’ is experienced and grasped as “will to power.” With this, the word ‘being’ loses its role as the foundational word of philosophy. ‘Being’ continues to designate ‘constancy.’ This is thought, in the mind of modern metaphysics, as ‘certainty’ and ‘security.’ But constant, certain security, and thus ‘being,’ is not the will to power itself; it is not ‘living’ itself, but rather only a condition living itself sets for itself. The will to power can only want what it alone wills and must want: namely, ‘more power,’ i.e., an increase in power in which the approached degree of power is secured from which and beyond which the next step is carried out. What is in each case secured (i.e., the particular being) and the actual security (i.e., being) remain, seen from within the perspective of the will to power, the perpetually and merely temporary, i.e., that which only ‘is’ in order to be overcome, and therefore what must necessarily evaporate in the blaze of the will to power. Certainly, however, the highest thinking of this metaphysics must itself remember being: [105] for if the will to power appears as the actuality of the actual and should remain determined as this, then the ‘living’ (i.e., the always becoming) must enter into the fundamental character of being; and even this ‘becoming,’ this will to power, must itself be willed as being. In fact, Nietzsche’s thinking in the vicinity of the metaphysics of the will to power is radical enough to admit this extreme concession to being. At the beginning of a long note, which he characterizes as a ‘recapitulation,’ Nietzsche says the following: “Imprinting the character of being onto becoming—that is the highest will to power.”9 The note appears in a draft consisting of 97 folios and double- folios that derives from two
9 Nietzsche, Werke, XVI, 101, The Will to Power, Aphorism 617.
78 The Inception of Occidental Thinking